When you add your blog to Google it sends it's spiders to index your blog. The spiders index all the pages in your blog and arrange them into a Main Index and a Supplemental Index. You should take all steps possible to prevent your pages from landing into the Supplemental Index.............When people search using Google it returns the results found in the Main Index. If it does not find any results there it turns to the Supplemental Index. When Google spiders crawl your blog whatever duplicate content they find is dumped into the Supplemental Index.

When you apply labels to your posts in the bottom frame of the post editor when creating a post or on the posts list page you are actually creating duplicate content. For example the following links on a New Blogger blog will bring up the same content :

http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/YEAR/MONTH/POST_TITLE_A

http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com//search/label/LabelA

http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com//search/label/LabelB

when the Labels A and B are applied to the post : POST_TITLE_A. When Google crawls your blog the duplicate content pages are placed in the Supplemental Index. The more labels a post has the more content is duplicated in the blog.

I did some research on this and found that blogs having labels were having this percentage ranging from 70 to 80%. Blogs with classic templates not using labels were having a very low percentage. You can check this put for yourself. If you find an old blog without labels calculate the percentage and you will see it is low.

This blog also has a higher percentage which I will aim to reduce by deleting unnecessary labels and by adding only one or two labels to each post in the future. Applying a label can get you traffic but too many labels will land your blog in the Supplemental Index.

HOW TO DELETE LABELS

To delete a label login to the Dashboard and click on Posts. The Posts list page will open. Check the box of the post which has the label you want to delete. Then click the down arrow at the top next to 'Label Actions'. Scroll down in the drop down list till you come to Remove Labels heading. Then click on the label you wish to remove. See picture below :

Note that you have to check the box of the post which contains that label otherwise that label will not appear in the drop down list.

12
comments:

I am new reader of your blog. I'll need to digest the contents of this one awhile. I use LABELS for my blog posts (new blogger). I'm still naive as to ways to improve things ... however, it appears that you're providing some guidance. I just have to take some time to understand how to implement the guidance on my blog.

I don't think this "delete labels to lower the percentage of pages in the Supplemental Index" makes much sense. At the end, what it actually matters is how many pages you have in the main index; lowering the percentage in the supplemental index does no good by itself. At the extreme, if you delete all labels, you might achieve 0% of pages in the SI, but the content of each post will be indexed only once. Each label you add to a given post will make the content of that post be indexed one more time. If the pages of some of those labels end at the SI, there's still not harm in that: they will simply be ignored for search, but they are really duplicates; your content is still indexed (and can be found) elsewhere. In other words, even if all the labels' pages end at the SI, you'll still get the same results as with no labels (ie: your content will only be indexed for the posts' pages). However each label making it to the main index will represent a net gain.

So I'd say exactly the opposite of what you said: having more labels is better.

I think we need to strike a balance between using Labels as an 'index' to the blog and using them as post tags.Generally tags are applied to luggage at the airport to identify who it belongs to. At least that is the analogy used when asked to explain labels/tags. Now consider what would happen if we covered a single piece of baggage with multiple tags!

It may be claimed by multiple people - TRAFFIC INCREASED!! but then confusion - who does the luggage really belong to ?

There are two advantages to tags :

1. Internal navigation aids. Too many labels will clutter up the page both below the posts area and making the sidebar very long unless you hide them in a +/- expansion list. In the latter case they will not be seen and may be missed by the less intuitive.

A bit late to the discussion, but all my tags were sent to the supplemental index on the first round, so it does happen,. However I write for readers not for bots, and readers like tags. So I will live with my dirty tags for now. I referred to this article in a post of my own on Tech Pisstaker cheers

Hi VinI checked the google supplement index entries for my blog (www.rarolens.com) - there were a lot of them (for the different blog posts) but the entries were all the same apart from the hot link.In fact entries show the blogger title (from the Settings page) and the description meta tag.I then checked your Blogdoctor index entries. the titles are all different and the entries describe what the post is about.How do you do this? I'm sure if I could get my Google index to look like this I would actually turn up in Google blog alerts.Hope you can help.Regards, Penelope

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Comments posted on Dummies Guide to Google Blogger (Beta) are moderated and will be approved only if they are on-topic and not abusive. Try not to include website URLs/links in your comments. You can email me : drbhatns at gmail dot com for any blogging question. Thanks,